IST Lunch Bunch

Thoroughly exploring the solar system with the current few earth escape missions per year is going to take some time. We present work that aims to dramatically accelerate the pace of exploration by engineering cultural and technical solutions to permit the task to be crowd sourced to thousands of citizen scientist explorers as an entertaining and educational activity. Once complete, individuals will be able to instantly and affordably design, deploy and operate their own spacecraft on-orbit. With a focus on practical and pragmatic precursor implementations with secured launch opportunities, this talk will demonstrate how the personal space age is being enabled by the Open Source Space System, including its integrated spacecraft development environments, mission control apps, redundant arrays of inexpensive ground stations, mass customisable thin-film spacecraft/landers/rovers, generic interplanetary CubeSats, and prepositioned orbiting spacecraft printers.